The Framer's Cutting and Layout Guide, or French Framer, is a carpenters tool to be used for home building and remodeling purposes.
Having been a carpenter for a long time gave me the idea of creating a tape measure for carpenters with various layout and cutting systems. The idea had come to me years earlier but it wasn't until the day I hung up my belt, in the storeroom of the house I built for my folks fifteen years before, that I really began working the problem. The stud layout, with its offset's were fixed, the key would be to see if a floating system of interior door rough openings would fit between the studs without interference. It wasn't possible but I found that by putting the common rough opening icon between 2¼″ and 3¾″ the one overlap was clean, that is the icon for the 3-0 rough opening was superimposed on a 5½″ offset stud and the large “T” did not interfere with the offset's wood grain pattern in the corner. The wall tee system worked as well, this time with both of the wall tee icons being superimposed over a couple of stud icons, and again with a clean look. One of the two commercial 3-0 interior door rough opening trimmer/studs filled in the space between the common tee wing icon and the tee wing for the 2×4 wall tee, while the other end fit in nicely just past the four foot stud icon. In the first 51 inches the floating “T” systems distribute themselves compactly amongst the studs. The addition of various cutting icons presented minimal interference problems. When I did a patent search, on the nineteenth of June 2002, I only found one patent close to my work: Antoine Duvall Davis (U.S. D 466,462). When I was introduced to other framing guides through contact with the patent office I saw the superiority of the French Framer as it improves on Lafrance (U.S. Pat. No. 6,494,014) by using readily recognizable icons, for stud offsets, and door trimmers, and minimizing the use of numbers, for simplicity sake, and as to not interfere with the numbers on the standard tape measure with which it is superimposed upon/integrated with; is more professional than Chilton (U.S. Pat. No. 6,684,522) as blocks are normally cut a 16th of an inch shorter to allow for the natural cupping of joists, rafters and studs. Better than Smith (U.S. Pat. No. 4,499,666), as it is streamlined and compact when integrated with a standard tape measure. With the addition of the squaring system and the commercial applications the French Framer is the most complete and efficient framing tape.